


A Wild Howling For Room-Corner Revolutions

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Beat Generation AU, Les Mis Across History, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Les Mis Across History fest, a Beat Generation Amis AU, a series of vignettes of their life in the Beat Hotel in Paris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wild Howling For Room-Corner Revolutions

**Author's Note:**

> The hotel at number 9 Rue Git-le-Couer is a real place and was really inhabited by the main artists of the beat generation in 1956-1959.  
> All poetry-stuff is by me, none of it is taken from any real poetry by the original beat poets.

The moment Madame Rachou opened her doors and let them in with a smile, that summer in 1957, the hotel became a haven. The cramped rooms were nothing for them, the way Rachou would bang on the door if any room used more than forty watts of electricity, the strange Turkish toilets and the constant smell of hashish, the constant noise of someone talking or playing music at any hour, it was nothing, because they were free. Number 9, Rue Git-le-Coeur had opened its arms to them and bid them hello and welcome in every language of the heart.

And so Enjolras and Grantaire had settled in a little room together, the little fifty pound bed holding another two hundred pounds, strong and sturdy in its little metal frame and straw-stuffed mattress. But they smiled and wrote and took walks along the Seine and Paris welcomed them. They had run away from the pointing fingers of the American press, the American media and the obscenity trials and the unfamiliar glares painting angry slashes across their work and words. But Paris was the most beautiful city in the world, and the city that welcomed them, that made a room for them and handed them fresh paper and pens, that made them coffee and tea without needing to ask, that grinned and smiled and told them to do anything they wanted, anything at all.

Enjolras and Grantaire were the first to move into their little room, with Courfeyrac coming next, and all three of them squeezed into the room, sleeping together in the bed, tangled together most nights with Grantaire's head tucked up under Enjolras' neck and Courfeyrac splayed across the both of them. Grantaire hung halfway out of the window and smoked while Enjolras leaned against the smooth plane of his back, scribbling out poetry and prayers and ideas of revolutions in thought and religion and emotion and sex and love on scraps of paper and newspapers and the backs of postcards from family back in New England. Courfeyrac wrote, too, splayed out on the floor next to the camper stove and the collection of dirty teacups that circled it.

The night that Combeferre joined them, settling into his little room a few doors down, Courfeyrac stood up on the bed and circled his arms to keep from falling as he leaned closer to the dim light bulb. He had a piece of paper in his hand and his hair was stuck to his head with sweat, sweat that glistened in the hollow of his neck and clung to the hairs on his chest. Grantaire and Enjolras sat cross-legged on the floor and stared up at him as he spread is his left arm out in front of him, leaning his right shoulder against the wall to stay upright.

"I want to pleasure the world with my fingers! Take them in hand so they will raise flushed faces to the me like the sun, like they think me an angel with prayers said in moans and streams of white!" He giggled madly and bounced on the mattress so that it creaked. His eyes glittered with excitement and his fingers drummed the air in some unidentifiable rhythm. "I want to fuck in the heat of the summer, fuck with words and poetry like circling birds, like starlings so that girls laugh and tug on my hair and tell me I'm full of smoke and charm even if I smell like sweat and old clothes. I will find a girl with a dog-face in the Jardin du Luxemburg and what will I do? I will show her my velvet suit and ugly necktie and she will call them beautiful and we will imagine harmonies in the traffic and the voices while we kiss up against a lamplight while the sky turns grey. And we will disappear with Tantric chants so America can never again find us in its searches and I will only reappear when San Francisco reaches out with its waves and sends them round the globe to find me, speaking in tongues and sucking on tongues and fucking with tongues and singing with tongues and it will bring me back to a metal bed and a straw mattress and a language that is beautiful and foreign like the bay and it will lay me down and fuck me like a lover."

And he grinned and flung the paper into the air, dropping down onto the mattress and letting Enjolras pick the poem up off the floor and lay it across two empty tea-stained mugs. Grantaire wolf-whistled softly and used Enjolras' shoulder to stand up from the floor in order to sit down on the bed, his upper body flung over Courfeyrac's legs with a laugh.

"Ambitions like yours are to be commended, Courfeyrac."

Courfeyrac rolled his eyes and shoved at Grantaire's shoulder. "And what would you like to do, then?"

Grantaire waggled his eyebrows, smirking. "Just the same as you."

"Ah, then you really shouldn't be speaking."

"I don't do what I'm told."

They stopped talking when Enjolras got up off the floor and stood on the chair, one hand flung out towards Courfeyrac. He smiled down at the two on the bed with his large, serious eyes.

" _There_ is freedom." he said, closing his hand into a fist and dropping it to his side before stepping down off the chair and joining them on the bed. Courfeyrac flung an arm over his shoulders and Grantaire managed to get most of the way onto his lap and they lay there without saying anything, breathing together and marveling at the feeling of chained thoughts and words unbound.

After Combeferre came the rest of the Amis, and others with them. Madame Rachou smiled at all of them, laughed with all of them, and only let eccentrics live in her little hotel. If you were not an artist or a writer or a laughing traveller with mismatched clothes and big ideas, she would not let you stay. And rooms were fifty cents a night, so everyone paid for months in advance so they wouldn't have to worry. It was a grand little life.

Bahorel grinned his huge wolfish grin and kissed Madame Rachou on the cheek and declared her a poetic revolutionary of the highest order, and the Amis cheered and stamped on the ground while she laughed and swung back around behind the counter to make them all coffees. Jehan and Bossuet sat on a table with guitar and harmonica and played and sang while the others listened and danced and talked.

The hotel at number 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur was nameless and tiny and cramped, run by Madame Rachou all by herself since her husband had died in a traffic accident. The beds were small and metal, with mattresses stuffed with straw and one or two thin blankets to sleep in. This only encouraged them all to bunk up, sprawling out over the beds together, legs and arms tangled and heads knocking together in the night. The bathroom was a tiny little Turkish thing, a hole in the floor with two porcelain footprints to stand on, cleaned out each week, and the shower was cold water only, one for the entire building. Madame Rachou kept the room costs down by prohibiting the use of electricity over forty watts, so most of the Amis simply lit candles, cooking with camping stoves or hotplates and using the candles for light. It was messy, dirty and the entire building smelled of hashish and patchouli and spilt beer but none of them cared. This was freedom, this was ecstasy, this was what they dreamed of. So they washed their clothes in the sinks and showered when they could and lit candles in the night to write and remembered the Romantic poets of the past and laughed and sang and lived.

The lobby of the hotel was crowded, usually full of the Amis and the number of other come-and-go artist guests that stayed at the hotel, talk and laughter and the scratch of pencils echoing through the room and Madame Rachou in the midst of all of it, perpetually behind the little counter, making food and drink and conversation in heavily accented English and grinning from ear to ear.

One afternoon Feuilly wanted to make a cartoon, a real cartoon like the ones on television, with little moving figures and some story within them. So he and Grantaire got to work, drawing on pieces of paper and pinning them up in one of the bigger rooms, all the way around the room at eye level.

"But how are you going to film them so they move?" Joly asked, spinning around to look at the story on the wall. He sneezed, and rubbed his nose with an ugly paisley handkerchief. His room was the only one that was spotless. He was afraid of germs.

"I've got an idea," Bahorel said, vibrating on the balls of his feet. He was always full of fire and energy, fingers forever drumming on the surfaces beneath them. His veins were full of sparks and lightning and he laughed like thunder, showing all of his teeth, and fought as much as he created and loved, and never ever stopped moving, even in his sleep.

He whispered in Feuilly's ear, one large hand clamped on the painter's shoulder, and Feuilly laughed and they left together without another word, shoulders bumping and smiles secretive. The others muttered together, wondering what they were going off to do. Chairs scraped together as they joked and laughed about their two friends. "I think they're going to go find one of those professional film people that have been walking around." "I think they're looking for someone who can magic those drawings into life." " _I_ think they're going out to have a nice fuck in an alleyway." "I think you're right."

They came back an hour and a half later, looking thoroughly fucked out, snorting and laughing as Bahorel wheeled Feuilly into the hotel lobby in a stolen supermarket trolley, skipping to some tune in his head, blamming his hands on the handle of the cart as he wheeled it towards the stairs. His shirt was off, balled up in the basket of the cart, bunching through the metal cage. Feuilly jumped out and picked up one end and together they hauled it up the stairs to the room where the cartoon was hung up on the wall.

"What's that for?" Someone called up from downstairs.

"Come up and see!" Bahorel yelled down, leaning over the bannister. The ones who were still peering up the stairs could see his manic grin. "Jehan, come up here! And bring your movie camera!"

Jehan grabbed his little Brownie camera and shoved his hair back from his face. His hair was long and thick, and he was constantly flicking it back from his eyes or shaking it away from his face. Most of the residents of the hotel followed him up the stairs, bumping into each other, shoving and catcalling. They crowded together in the doorway of the bare room, where Bahorel and Feuilly had set the trolley down by the first page of the cartoon and were standing proudly beside it.

"Get in, get in, come on!" Bahorel pointed to the bed of the cart, and Jehan handed his camera to Feuilly to hold while he climbed inside. The camera transferred back to its owner, Bahorel and Feuilly explained their plan and Jehan knelt inside the cart, camera up to his eye as the two friends positioned themselves at the front and back ends of the cart.

"Go!" Feuilly shouted, and Jehan started up his camera, laughing as he was pulled along in the trolley, capturing the little cartoon on his film as they raced past each frame pinned to the wall, an animation without all the hassle. The crowd in the doorway cheered them on and cries of "Crazy!" "Brilliant!" "You mad cat, Bahorel!" spurred them on as they ran about the room, spinning the trolley in a frenzy of delight as they finished the circumvention of the room. Jehan handed his camera to Feuilly again and tripped his way out of the cart, giggling, his hair frizzed out in a wheat gold mess from the spinning. He looked like a laughing saint with a halo of yellow threads.

The clamor of cheers died down to a smaller din when Bahorel threw his hands into the air, bouncing on his toes like a boxer. "We are the pushers of our own destiny!" He cried. "We are the pullers of our own trolley! Roll on!"

The next cheer was loud enough, with Amis banging on the walls and doorframe, stamping their feet in the hallway, that Madame Rachou leaned up the stairwell, yelling out in French for them to be quiet.

Jehan developed the film that night, and the next day he and Feuilly ran gleefully from room to room with a projector sitting on a box in the trolley, showcasing their little animation to anyone with a bare wall who'd watch. It was their newest masterpiece, a real cartoon, and it was perfect.

Evenings, Grantaire and Marius, and sometimes others, would climb the staircase to the roof of the building, and would climb out through the window and haul themselves onto the roof to smoke and watch the sunset and the streets below. Grantaire would lie on his belly and dangle his arms off the edge of the roof, flicking cigarette ash down to the street and singing made up little songs about the grey beauty of Paris and the peace Enjolras preached and the Algerian War happening simultaneously and how everything was was a grey spiral that constantly circled downward but never actually went down. And Marius would sit with one leg bent and one stretched and look out across the rooftops and listen to Grantaire sing his rough little songs and think about the Romantics of the past.

"So the two of you-- you're like poetry twins," Marius commented one evening as he listened to Grantaire ramble and sing off the gutter of the building. "Lovers in life as in poetry, twins together in words. And now I sound silly."

Grantaire laughed, rolling onto his back and hanging his head over the edge for a moment to look upside down at the street before sitting up and crossing his legs. "There's a big difference between Enjolras and me. Enjolras, he has head feelings, voice feelings." He climbed up the slate roof to sit next to Marius, resting his arms on both of his knees and pinching his face up to the grey clouds above. "His poetry is full of beautiful morning imagery and complex thoughts and he makes black things beautiful and gold things harmonic. He thinks it and it is, his feelings are from his mind, and he sees the world like one big marble flying above it, like one great big heart and he's in the sky feeling it all. Me, I have chest feelings, cock feelings, I can't write like he does. I write standing on the dirt, I write staring out the window at the sky, not in it, I write from the emotion in my stomach, the tingle and pull, you know."

"Hmm," Marius hummed, and stole a bit of Grantaire's cigarette, which had burned down low enough that it nearly singed his fingers when he took it. They stared together out at the top of the Eiffel Tower, which was just visible from their rooftop perch, thrusting into the sky.

When they climbed back in through the window, Feuilly and some others were getting ready to climb out, 'to imagine ladders into the heavens for each of us,' one explained. Grantaire grinned and bade them a good journey, twirling about and miming panpipes. They departed, and Grantaire found Enjolras in their room, a mug of tea balanced on his knee as he sat cross-legged on the bed and wrote with a dying pen that he had to shake every couple of minutes to get the ink flowing again. He lay down behind Enjolras, curling his body around the golden poet's back, leaning his head on his hand and watching the words form and fuck and flower under the strokes of the dying pen.

Jehan had a hallucination on a bus, a dream brought on by the flashing strobes of light through the trees, and he told the group of it excitedly: a vague, dream-like, trance-like state like being just barely in control of some bizarre vision, where he could create and watch movies in his head. And the next day he rummaged in trash bins until he found a piece of cardboard which he cut slits into and rolled into a cylinder. He stole a turntable from Bossuet and a lamp from Eponine and sat in his room for an hour or two.

"I've made a dream machine!" He announced at dinnertime. "Come and see!"

They did, all running up the stairs to Jehan's room and sitting on the floor while he turned on the light and the turntable. "Close your eyes and face the light. It's beautiful!"

The light turned on, and the cardboard cylinder began to rotate on the turntable, light flashing through the slits, a rhythmic strobe of pinkish yellow light. With their eyes closed, they saw splashes of colour, and the colour became symbols sliding over each other, and the symbols became shapes and patterns and colour and they felt surrounded by it, blanketed by it. There was nothing in the room but breathing and the soft sound of the rotating cardboard until Jehan turned off the machine and they all sat there in the dark for a moment before opening their eyes and leaping up to embrace the long-haired poet.

"That was crazy, man! How did you think of that!"

"Amazing!"

"Like a trip without a trip!"

"Everyone in life should try that!"

And Bossuet didn't even mind giving up his turntable to set the dream machine out in the hall for anyone to use, though Eponine made Jehan buy her a new lamp.

And the group was full of a wild fascination for all things. They stayed up late into the night, running from room to room, writing, discussing, creating. Bossuet, Enjolras, and Eponine sat on the floor of the lobby and discussed Sartre at length, Bossuet interjecting with Latin phrases laughed through his nose while Eponine responded in French with her smokey voice as dark as her hair. Bahorel and Feuilly had wild, laughing sex that could be heard from most floors, prompting the rest of the Amis to howl out themselves, or laugh, or crow, or sing, or play the hand drums to the rhythm of the bed creaking in the other room. Joly and Jehan strung broken teacups stolen from trash bins along the banister of the stairs by bits of twine and drew figures of women on the walls in charcoal, figures of men in pastels, and blended the two together above for stars and dreams and the universe and souls sliding up into the air and laughing together in the night. Combeferre sat back-to-back with Courfeyrac in his room under the dim lightbulb and they wrote together, flinging words and phrases into the air and scribbling them where they landed. Grantaire smoked and drank and grinned his wild grin and sometimes tried to write head poems but always they turned into chest poems and it was okay.

They were lounging in the lobby on a Saturday, with Madame Rachou bored and unbusy in the back, mending a skirt or a shirt or some other garment of clothing, all of them talking idly and writing, Jehan strumming his little guitar at random intervals without thinking much of it. All at once, Enjolras leapt onto a chair, the light shining sideways through the window haloing him like a saint or a prophet and he threw his hands in the air for silence or almost silence or listening at least.

"America has pointed its finger at us! They question words of spirit and words of body and they read it in newsreel and literary merit instead of consuming the soul of the work with their souls! They cannot tap dance across the page until they allow themselves-- allow us-- to sit back in the psychoanalyst's chair bent backward with the blow of realization that you can do whatever you want. Why not? We should be able to take Peyote in the middle of Times Square and grin at the moon that's out in the daytime and see visions of mothers and spirits and gods and soldiers and big fat-bellied Buddhas. And we should be able to have poetry readings, invite Plato in, Catullus in, Socrates in, without being slammed by gavel and fist. We read, and the air listens, because oh, we sing to foreign soil. We play at its feet, it has not yet noticed us."

Courfeyrac sat up on his knees, holding on to the back of the chair to keep from falling over, and raised one hand and called out. "And we should eat cheeses where we please! Take the milk-meat of the world and smother ourselves with it, running through the streets stinking of fromage and screaming out obscenities to the White House!"

"Question the addiction to silence!" Combeferre called out, and the others were joining in the fervor, too, getting up on their knees or sitting on the tables and waving manuscripts or sheet music or sketches or empty or full coffee mugs in the air. "Scream out head words and heart words and feel everything all the time."

Enjolras' eyes were bright with excitement, his face serious but light, and the slight swaying of his body plucked at the energy of the room like a violin string and everyone could feel the world vibrating in the room. "We have to let go and make poetry out of the stale coffee grounds, to grin madly at the mental hospitals and tell them go fuck themselves we are not mad _war_ is mad, war is not reality like we are!"

"To knock down the men standing guard at the Pentagon!" Eponine cried out, and tugged off her hat so her hair was a big black cloud zipping over her head, and her big brown eyes were huge. "To climb in through the windows and erase the laws!"

"To dance through Harlem and across the Presidio and through New Orleans up to New Jersey and back around again!"

"To paint women and men on the walls of the Chrysler building so everyone can see the natural body is holy!"

"To fuck together in alleyways!" Bahorel cried out. Feuilly let out a whoop of agreement and clapped him on the shoulder. "To fuck assholes or cunts and laugh-- the body is a temple to be shared! A temple to be given alms constantly! Nothing to hide away and preserve! We should fuck and be fucked in grins and speak in heavenly moans and paint with splashes of sweat blood come to show our passion!"

"To fuck men." Enjolras nodded, and Grantaire grinned and thumped the back of his head against the wall, raising his beer bottle in a toast. "To fuck men, to fuck men, to fuck men and negroes and Japanese girls with sideways smiles and run naked through Manhattan or Mission. Let the president complain about the mud in his eyes or the come in his eyes! Tell the judges that Wilde was just like you and I and now scribbles in holy fluids all across heaven for them!"

"Throw your telephone out the window!" Jehan called out. On his head was a crown made of woven flowers, and beads from street merchants waterfalled down his neck. The group hummed with enthusiasm. "Communicate in songs and sighs and silly things painted on walls. Smoke pot on Wall Street! Turn propaganda into art into spirit into love! Fuck against posters and glue and stick to the walls in a statement of freedom to creation!"

"Paint bodies, paint animals, paint great big splashes of colour expression. Give a middle finger or two fingers or your tongue to the obscenity trials that tug at your canvas! Lift up your shirt and show them your breasts and tell them nothing is ever as real as you!"

Grantaire sat up and raised his glass, sitting backward on the chair. "Let the holy golden angel love you in the sky, love you in the dirt! Burn toast for the angel and let him smoke your cigarettes and eat your cock and hold fast to your hair! Drink the angel down in Tangiers, in Thailand, in Tibet. Tell him to speak his radiant words to you and do it all over again!"

"Set Algeria free with words and say their bodies holy their minds holy their hijabs holy their burqas holy!"

"Scream with delight in police cars when you vomit on the street, when you paint subway cars with your mind and fuck spirituality up against a wall, punch the signs that chant You Can't You Can't in the face and do it all anyway!"

"Become self-made, self-built, self-taught, self-fucked, then give it out to the masses with handfuls of your money-thoughts."

"Scrape songs for pure language and make it into everything!" Enjolras slapped his hands down on his thighs and everyone in their chairs sat up taller, hummed louder. "Send letters to America expressing intent to divorce mind from body. Denounce bombs, denounce wars, denounce money mass capital dream, denounce Hollywood, denounce the grinning teeth of congressmen seeing the world through the metal acid rain of Wall Street! Send photographs of selfhood to America, send them foreign smiles and jam made on broken stoves and send them stained mattresses from hotels in Bombay. Send movie reels of sucking cocks in public restrooms under stained mirrors, send photographs of India Rome China Paris, park your car in the street and scream your horn out across Brooklyn until everything is covered in the come of your words of revolution."

Grantaire threw his bottle on the floor and it broke with a loud smash, glass shattering in glittering shards at Enjolras' feet, the sun glancing off of them to make amber diamonds and the group cheered and stamped its feet and drummed on the tables and Enjolras got down very seriously off of his chair, but he grinned and vibrated with energy when Grantaire grabbed him by the collar and stuck his tongue in his mouth.

And that's how they lived, grinning each day with orgiastic joy and wonder even at things dirty and broken, writing and creating sad and happy. Paris held them in her hand and lifted them far away from everything so they could all look down at the world from the sky, even Grantaire who wanted to stay on the ground in the dirt. They played music dedicated to life and spoke of philosophy and drew on the walls and wrote and painted and burned with nameless passion and rivers ran with their semen and their shouts of laughter. Freedom was their love song, their anthem, their pilot and passenger. They were madness inside themselves and creation disguised as madness in the cradle of number 9. And when they left, back to America to scream freedom and love to the grey pounding streets of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Olympia, Denver, their footsteps echoed in the stairway and their voices were stamped on the ceilings and their drawings bled through the paint on the walls and their cries of love-desire creation-desire freedom-desire stained the entire building so the words rose up each night into the electric air without them and fucked liberty love poetry to the stars to rain down the deepest parts of their souls on the holy rooftops below.

**Author's Note:**

> The [Beat Hotel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Hotel) was a real place, run by Madame Rachou. There's a pretty awesome documentary about it on Netflix (titled The Beat Hotel).  
> The [Dream Machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine) is a real thing created by Brion Gysin.  
> Grantaire's monologue about the difference between himself and Enjolras was inspired by Peter Orlovsky's poem "Me & Allen."  
> The Amis' characterisations were roughly based on various real beat poets. Enjolras = Allen Ginsberg, Grantaire = Peter Orlovsky, Courfeyrac = Gregory Corso, Combeferre = WS Burroughs, Jehan = Brion Gysin, Eponine = Diane di Prima, Bahorel = Neal Cassady.


End file.
